At Risk

A 1st-time Novelist Takes A Chance, And Succeeds, At Making Us Care About A Girl In Trouble

February 14, 1999|By Lynna Williams. Lynna Williams is the author of the collection "Things Not Seen and Other Stories." She is the head of the creative-writing program at Emory University.

THUMBELINA

By Andrea Koenig

Scribner, 285 pages, $22

Andrea Koenig's first novel, "Thumbelina," resides in that treacherous place where young girls are at risk from birth and live to see the risks--the thousand variations of harm that can come to them--escalate with every passing day. Whether every "girl" whose DNA is fictional is, by definition, already a girl in trouble depends, of course, on who is doing the defining. (Daisy Buchanan? Sure. Every time. Even with the money. But Anna Karenina? Excuse me, no.)

Koenig's novel, however, fits clearly within a defined territory of contemporary American fiction, in which the vulnerability of young, female narrators is situational first, then psychic, then both, painfully intertwined. It's the old question, plated anew: Which came first--the self-destructive chicken with no parenting skills, or the scrambled egg? It's enough to make the quaint phrase "in trouble" seem deserving of nostalgia; we might hope that the worst thing that ever happens to these girls is an unplanned pregnancy, but we'd be wishing on some other universe's stars.

But the risks facing the girls in trouble aren't the only ones involved. There are risks, too, for novels that stake virtually everything on the appeal of young girls' voices, daring us not to conclude that we've seen this sad story before, maybe in a "Frontline" documentary, maybe in an "After-School Special." In 1999, after all, what girls-in-trouble story can possibly be unfamiliar?

In cultural terms, we may feel we know the answer--too well, in fact. But in novels, we can be made to care, still, about a character who speaks to us truthfully, who can be said, finally, to be herself more than she's a hook for the story or a marketable collection of speech and mannerisms.

In the opening pages of Koenig's novel, the outlook isn't that good. Her 14-year-old narrator has a determinedly outlandish name, Thumbelina, and her troubles are a mini-series. The mother who stuck her with the name has given her a fairy-tale life only in the Grimm-est sense: poverty, complications, betrayal. And now, Thumbelina's mother has just driven her abusive boyfriend's car into a duck pond and drowned:

"My mom left me smack in the middle of this month. Fifteen days ago. After three days we buried her because everybody in this world copies Jesus."

Those lines capture some of the rhythm of the narrating voice, but it's the tone that matters. Gradually, as Thumbelina tells her story, her voice, flat, observant, at times truly unexpected, begins to win out. Yes, there's a kind of piling on of sadness and calamity in this story, but listening to Thumbelina, we're lured into believing the truth of her story--her story, not that of any other girl in trouble. Thumbelina knows what she thinks, or what she wants to figure out, and she's able, and willing, to tell us all about it. The harder things are, the more she talks, trying to make sense out of circumstances and events we know at once can have no satisfactory explanation. Unless bad luck is an explanation, and bad timing, and, oh, the 20th Century.

Thumbelina is pregnant, she discovers during a physical exam required when she's put into foster care. Here, the doctor (who was once her junior high softball coach) has just suggested she think about an abortion:

"Doctor, I said. A fish this stupid is a fish I got a soft spot for. And I slid off the table and crossed my arms over the topic of our conversation.

"The doctor blinked at me.

"I wasn't born this mornin, Doctor. I pick up a little bit, here and there. I know what you're talkin about. . . . But I don't want to kill nothin. Maybe she (the baby) met my mom on her way in. Who knows."

Danger is everywhere. Thumbelina runs away from the foster home with Myrna, another pregnant girl, and a cycle begins of seeking food and shelter, some kind of haven, no matter how temporary. But the real danger for Thumbelina is the intersection of past and present, in the form of a "legacy" from the father of her child, made possible in part by her selfish, heedless mother. The story, the truth of the story, comes out as Koenig cuts back and forth in time in Thumbelina's child/woman voice.

The doctor again, in another visit, asking her how she has been:

"Not too well, obviously, or I wouldn't be sittin here now, would I?

"With an abnormality on your tongue, he nodded, which I suspect is candida, commonly known as thrush. Often found in the mouths of people infected with--"

Thumbelina cuts him off with a coughing fit, half real, half Sarah Bernhardt, but the truth is already inside her, and perhaps inside her child as well. When she knows the truth, Thumbelina sets out to give her baby a happy life, whatever that means, whatever that takes. And she does it while living with the knowledge that her own mother, infected with the same disease, made vastly different choices. Over the course of the novel, Koenig's devotion to Thumbelina's voice, to her character and her story, becomes as important as Thumbelina's ferocious care for the "fish" swimming inside her.